On 3 March 1067, in deep snow on the Nemiga River near Minsk, the three eldest sons of Yaroslav the Wise defeated Prince Vseslav of Polotsk. The Primary Chronicle says only that the slaughter was fierce, that many fell and that Vseslav fled; it gives no numbers for the armies or the dead. Its account of the campaign is also the first written mention of Minsk. The date is in the Julian calendar.
A rebel prince of Polotsk
Vseslav Bryachislavich, prince of Polotsk in what is now Belarus, attacked Pskov and then seized Novgorod, one of the great cities of Rus. The chronicle tells of the seizure of Novgorod under the same year as the battle.1
The three eldest sons of Yaroslav the Wise, Iziaslav of Kiev, Sviatoslav of Chernigov and Vsevolod of Pereiaslavl, joined forces and marched against Vseslav in a hard winter. They went first to Minsk, a town of the Polotsk principality, and at the end of February 1067 laid siege to it. When the people of Minsk shut their gates, the brothers took the town, killed the men and carried off the women and children, the chronicle says; the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine adds that Vseslav's army did not arrive in time to help.2
Battle in the snow
The two armies met on the Nemiga on 3 March. According to the chronicle there was deep snow, the two sides advanced against each other, the slaughter was fierce and many fell, and Iziaslav, Sviatoslav and Vsevolod prevailed while Vseslav fled. That is almost all that is known about the fighting. The chronicle gives no figures for the armies or the dead, and none should be invented for it.3
The battle was remembered for its bloodshed. The Tale of Igor's Campaign, probably written late in the following century, gives it several lines, in which on the Nemiga they spread sheaves of heads and its bloody banks were sown not with good things. The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine explains these lines by the losses of the campaign, which were so striking that the poem still recalled them.4
Where was the Nemiga?
The Nemiga was a small tributary of the Svislach, in the basin of the Dnieper. Most scholars identify it with a stream that now runs under central Minsk in an underground culvert, the commentary to the Pushkin House edition of the chronicle notes. The same commentary cites the archaeologist L. D. Pobol, who placed early Minsk about 16 kilometers west of the later city, and observes that a great battle on the banks of the river, as the chronicle and the Igor Tale describe it, is hard to fit to so small a stream.5
The chronicle's report of the campaign is the first written mention of Minsk; Britannica too dates the town's first mention to 1067. The chronicle dates the battle to 3 March of the year 6575 counted from the creation of the world, which modern editions convert to 1067; the date is in the Julian calendar.6
A broken oath
Some months later the brothers invited Vseslav to talks and kissed the cross, swearing that he would come to no harm. Trusting the oath, he crossed the Dnieper by boat to their camp at Rsha, today's Orsha, near Smolensk. There he was seized and taken to Kiev with two of his sons and put in a dungeon. The date of the arrest is uncertain: the Old Russian text of the chronicle gives 10 June, while the modern translation in the same edition and the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine give 10 July.7
He did not stay there long. In September 1068, after the brothers had been beaten by the Polovtsians, the people of Kiev rose, freed Vseslav from his dungeon and set him up in the prince's court, the chronicle records. Rus saw another famous winter battle almost two centuries later, when Alexander Nevsky's Novgorodians fought the Livonian knights on frozen Lake Peipus; see our article on the Battle of the Ice.8
Note: no source gives the size of the armies or the losses. The date of Vseslav's arrest appears as 10 June in the Old Russian text and as 10 July in the modern translation and in the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine.
